An incident of some kind on Saturday night, following the Orange's 23-6 loss to Connecticut at the Carrier Dome, was the apparent tipping point. And so, Casullo -- specifically, the special teams/tight ends coach -- is gone.

Casullo, not usually disinclined to talk, has yet to surface to speak about this development. In the meantime, I offer the following column, written by me and appearing in the current edition of "Central New York Sports Magazine" -- the 116-page Winter Issue with Fab Melo on the cover.

Analyze as you wish . . .

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He has become the show within the show, the steak sauce smothering the T-bone, the fins on that ’59 Cadillac. There is the football game between Syracuse University and whatever club it happens to be playing on Saturday. And there is Bob Casullo, the 5-foot-10 volcano of an assistant coach threatening to blow at any minute somewhere along the Orange bench.

He’s equal parts jackhammer, noon whistle and foghorn, all of it stuffed into a body that had been a beer barrel in another life. Freight trains rumble more quietly through the night, a tossed bowling ball is more subtle.

And this north wind of a man would have it no other way.

“I don’t disagree with that,” Casullo declared when told he can get, um, boisterous while he, um, lectures those athletes in his charge. “I’m not offended by that at all. What would tick me off is if somebody said, ‘It’s just an act.’ Believe me, it’s not an act. This is me. This is my nature. This is the way I coach.”

He’s done it, loudly and marvelously and without interruption, for 38 consecutive seasons -- a remarkable demonstration of staying power. And Bob has done it at virtually every rung on the proverbial coaching ladder beginning with those 12 years spent at Henninger and Baldwinsville high schools and peaking (so far) with those two Super Bowl runs while in the employ of the Oakland Raiders and Seattle Seahawks.

There have been more celebrated coaching careers, sure. But as Casullo has barked for two high schools (right here in Central New York) and three colleges and four pro outfits, as he’s worked the sidelines in 10 college bowl games and in 15 NFL playoff affairs and in Super Bowl Nos. XXXVII and XL, his is headed for a bound volume on a library shelf.

You know, even if he winds up being the author.

“I’m going to write a book some day,” Casullo promised, “and the title is going to be something like, ‘Look At Me, Ma.’ When I think about it, it’s hard to equate where I’ve been with where I come from. I mean, I used to think Utica was Manhattan. I’m just a guy from a small town. I’m just Bob from Little Falls.”

He was, back in the day, a quarterback and a power forward for those Little Falls High School Mountaineers (and would have been a pitcher/third baseman/outfielder for them, too, had he not chosen to work springs and summers sorting bottles and loading trucks at his grandfather’s beer distributorship). And then he went onto SUNY Brockport, where he morphed into an honorable mention All-America fullback on some middling Golden Eagles squads.

His titles with the Orange under his long-time friend, Doug Marrone, with whom he worked at Georgia Tech and with the Jets? Bob is the assistant head coach, he’s the special teams coordinator, he’s the tight ends ramrod. And from beneath those three hats, and at the age of 59 (none of it mellow), he suffers poorly the clueless among us.

“Don’t sit there and tell me I stink,” said Casullo during SU’s bye week when the Orange rested at 3-1. “I don’t need jerks criticizing my coaching ability. You want to get my goat? Tell me I can’t coach. But understand this: Be ready when I come back at you. I’ll stand by my record. And that record is going to get better as we move forward with this thing.”

When the undermanned Syracuse special teams, in particular, threw some shoes last fall in Marrone’s inaugural 4-8 campaign, Casullo heard all about it. And he seethed. And while all phases of the Orange program -- including those monitored by Casullo -- showed improvement in the early going this time around, Bob remained uncomfortable with the whispers, real or imagined.

“It shouldn’t get to me, but it does,” he admitted. “My wife asks all the time, ‘Why does it bother you so much?’ I don’t know. It just does.”

As it happens, those restless natives, whatever the number, have only provided more motivation for Casullo, a fellow who’s never been challenged in that department. Especially when it comes to Syracuse football.

Why, as a kid, he sat in old Archbold Stadium and watched Ernie Davis and Floyd Little and John Mackey and Larry Csonka and all the rest. As a high-schooler, he took his SAT exam with a transistor radio hidden in a pocket of his pants, with a wire running up his shirt and with a plug in his ear, and listened to that day’s Orange game. And as a 53-year-old man, he applied with fairly high hopes for SU’s vacant head-coaching job that eventually went to Greg Robinson.

So, the very passionate Bob Casullo dearly loves Syracuse, both school and city. And he’s going to do his part to return Syracuse, both school and city, to, as Lonesome Dove’s Gus McCrae might say, the sunny slopes of long ago. And, yes, he’ll do so at full roar . . . and sometimes with language so blue out there on the field that it could ground a sparrow.

“I know the players can’t be 100% correct 100% of the time,” said Casullo, who might as well have been talking, too, about those officials in the striped shirts who have driven him batty for nearly four decades. “Unfortunately, I want them to be. And when they aren’t, that ticks me off because that reflects on me. And I let them know it.

“But they understand. Players don’t like phonies. They know that’s me and, practices or games, they know that’s the way I always am. Let’s say during the week I’m nice and put my arm around them and tell them, ‘You’re wonderful. I love you. But, gee, you shouldn’t have done that.’ And then let’s say on Saturday, I’m screaming and cursing and popping veins. Or vice versa. They’d look at me and wonder who the whacko was.”

Be advised that there is no confusion among those young men under Bob Casullo’s watch. They know exactly who the whacko is. And unlike the rest of us, they don’t have to pay for tickets to the show.

(Bud Poliquin’s columns, his “To The Point” observations and his freshly-written on-line commentaries appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. His work also regularly appears on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, he can be heard Mondays through Fridays (10 a.m.-12 noon), on the “Bud & the Manchild” sports-talk radio show on The Score 1260-AM. E-mail: bpoliquin@syracuse.com.)